The Room of Clarity
by romansilence
Summary: Sequel to "A Conversation". Zedd deals with what he learned about Kahlan's feelings for Cara.


Disclaimer: The characters and background story of "Legend of the Seeker" belong to Terry Goodkind, ABC Studios etc. No copyright infringement is intended, no profit will be made.

This short piece follows after a href= lots_ "A Letter"/a and a href=" lots_""A Conversation"/a.

Summary: Zedd deals with his new-found knowledge about Kahlan's feelings for Cara. It starts pretty much where "A Conversation" ended.

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**The Room of Clarity**

by

romansilence

Zedd walked briskly through the corridors of the Confessor's Palace. His face was impassive, as unreadable as a Confessor's, far from the jovial expression he usually showed. He also walked much faster than normal. The combination let the servants scurry out of his way and the nobles cast him speculative looks.

Zedd was oblivious to both. He wasn't even aware of where his feet were carrying him.

He had not shown it when he had left Kahlan on that balcony looking down at her love interest. He had not shown it but he was angry. He was angry at Kahlan. He was angry at the Spirits. He was angry at the Creator. He was angry at Cara. He was angry at Richard. He was angry at himself.

Zedd entered the Wizard's Keep but he didn't return to his room where Richard was still busy trying to get out of the binding spell. Instead he took another corridor that let him to the South tower, the highest tower of the Keep. He started to ascend the spiral staircase with a swiftness belying his age and seeming frailty. On his way up he easily passed through magical barriers that would have taxed the abilities of a wizard with lesser power. Zedd just brushed them aside.

He reached the top floor of the tower. It consisted of a single round room with pitch black walls and no windows. In complete darkness Zedd walked to the middle of the room until he reached a round indentation on the floor. He raised his hands.

A ball of orange Wizard's fire appeared, revealing that the room was completely empty. He let the fire fly against the wall and threw the next ball before the first had even hit. Soon the individual balls turned into a continuous stream of liquid fire streaming from his hands towards the walls. He began to slowly turn in a circle.

An ordinary wall would have crumbled under the force of even a single attack. The black walls, however, absorbed the fire, and after the first circuit had been completed they began to successively change colour. With every round the walls became lighter; dark grey, a lighter grey, light grey, dark grey, a muddy white, a blinding white. When Zedd finally sank to the floor, completely exhausted and drained the glaring white gentled to a warm, comforting light and a big Grace appeared on the floor, dark grey against the still black floor.

Zedd closed his eyes. His anger was still there but it was no longer consuming him. He felt that he had distanced himself from the anger and was now looking at it with calm logic. Though anger was a good and sometimes necessary emotion to fuel certain kinds of magic, like Richard's Sword of Truth and his Wizard's Fire, it was of no use most other times. Anger tended to make a person, wizard or not, blind to the truth.

And the truth was that it was not helpful or reasonable to be angry at himself. Just like Richard he had welcomed the growing friendship between Cara and Kahlan, had done his best to support it. That mortal enemies, a Confessor and a Mord-Sith could overcome their training to become friends had let him marvel at the strength of these two women and human beings in general.

Should he have seen that there was more than friendship at least on Kahlan's side? He reviewed their interaction and didn't find any indication that there had been more. What-ifs were never of any use but Zedd still speculated what he could have done had he seen it in time. He could have talked to Kahlan, tried to make her see reason. He could have warned Richard, made him aware of the danger but would he have done that and would Richard have listened?

It was not reasonable to be angry at Richard. Even the Seeker of Truth was not all-knowing and concerning Kahlan his grandson had always had an unrealistic blind spot. Would knowing that Kahlan's affection lay with someone els… with Cara have sparked Richard's ambition to become more worthy of the Mother Confessor or would it have sent him back to Westland? Probably the later, Zedd mused, and that still was a very concrete danger. Richard had accepted the mantle of the Seeker willingly but he still showed extreme reluctance to also accept his destiny as the future ruler of D'Hara.

It was not reasonable to be angry at Cara. Cara had acted like a true friend by trying to keep her distance from Kahlan, not only by limiting their personal interaction but also by changing back from the woman she had become to the Mord-Sith Kahlan had been conditioned to hate and despise. It had been a selfless act he could only applaud though he was not sure if in the end it would change anything. Kahlan already knew what kind of woman lay under the Mord-Sith armour, and she had fallen in love with that woman.

It was not reasonable to be angry at the Spirits or the Creator. Contrary to popular belief the spirits never interfered in the life of human beings, gifted or not. And the Creator's most precious gifts to her creation were feelings, reason and the free will to use or overcome both.

Feelings, Kahlan's passionate feelings for Cara. The words of Wizard's Third Rule popped in his mind: Passion rules reason, for better or for worse. Would Kahlan let her passion rule her reason? Could he believe her protestation that despite her feelings for Cara nothing between her and Richard would change?

He wanted to believe her and logically speaking he had every reason to believe her. Kahlan was a Confessor, more than that, Kahlan was the Mother Confessor. She had been taught from an early age that the only passion a Confessor can allow herself to have, the only love she might ever feel was passion and love for duty. And Kahlan was a true Confessor. She knew duty. She would always put the Greater Good of the Midlands and now D'Hara and the rest of the New World before her own wants and desires. She would bury her feelings for Cara and be a devoted, loving wife to Richard.

As if it were that easy, Zedd thought. Strong feelings were not that easily subdued, and there were two things Kahlan had probably not taken into account with her resolution to just go on as if she had not fallen in love with Cara. The first was Richard, the one true Seeker in a thousand years, and the second was the woman Kahlan Amnell.

What would happen to the carefree young woman Richard had slowly drawn out of her Confessor's shell? Would she succumb under the burden of her hidden feelings? Would she grow bitter and angry? Would she start to make the wrong decisions because she could no longer hear the voice of her own heart? Was there anything he could to do to make it easier for Kahlan?

Zedd's breathing slowed while he considered about a dozen magical ways to do just that, to make her forget, from a single spell that any wizard worth that designation could perform to intricate, powerful magic. A memory spell would be the most obvious solution, a spell that would make her forget about her romantic feelings for Cara and leave them only as friends, nothing more.

The spell itself would be relatively easy; there was a whole section in one of the libraries here at the Keep that dealt with memory spells. Well, the books and scrolls were more about the consequences of such spells which could be disastrous. Memory spells worked well when one tried to deal with traumatic events. He had done it with Richard the year prior when they still had been searching for the Boxes of Orden. Richard had been given the memory of having murdered an innocent woman and he had asked him to make the images in his mind go away.

Memory spells didn't work as well with pleasant, positive feelings. Depending on the strength of Kahlan's feelings for the Mord-Sith it would last a week or a moon or a season or even a season cycle, but then those feelings would come back, and they not only would come back, Kahlan would also know what he had done.

Bags! What was he thinking? Performing a memory spell without a person's consent was anathema, unacceptable, taboo. It tampered with the Creator's greatest gift, the free will and even a Wizard of the First Order should be careful with something like that. Wizards use people, yes, they manipulate people and events, yes, but intervening this way in someone's free will, especially with someone like Kahlan. No, it would backfire, big time.

Kahlan would never forgive him for such a blatant lack of trust. It would send a message he sure as the rift in the veil to the underworld had been closed did not want to send. I would mean that he didn't trust Kahlan Amnell, the woman. More than that, it would mean that he didn't trust the Mother Confessor, the highest moral authority of the Midlands. He couldn't do that. He respected Kahlan too much. He could, however, he resolved, keep an eye on her and offer it to her as a solution should it become too hard for her to keep her feelings for Cara hidden. Yes, that's what he would do, though he knew deep down that Kahlan was too strong willed to resort to such means.

Richard on the other hand was quite another can of worms. As much as Zedd loved his grandson, he knew very well that he was impulsive and prone to follow his instincts and his heart instead of cold reason. As the Seeker of Truth it more often than not was the right thing to do. Over the last two years it had saved all of their lives more often than he cared to remember. But the fact remained; there was no telling how Richard would react should he ever find out that Kahlan desired Cara.

Zedd knew that his grandson still harboured dreams of whisking Kahlan away to Hartland to live in cabin and work as a woods guide with Kahlan staying at home with their children. It was a childish and unrealistic notion, Richard knew that. Richard knew that Kahlan would never run away from her duty and that her duty bound her to Aydindril and the Midlands. Richard knew that the whole New World needed Kahlan and that she would never hide from that. Richard had accepted that, at least rationally. But how would he react when he learned that Kahlan's duty was not his only rival for her affection?

What would Richard do when he found out that Kahlan loved Cara, that the love of his life loved his best friend? Richard Cypher, the woods guide, Zedd was convinced, would run and hide in his beloved forest. Richard, the Seeker, would probably take out his anger at a practice dummy. He would sulk for a while and then try to convince Kahlan to follow her heart because more than anything the Seeker would want to see the woman he loved be happy, and Cara was a good choice for a mate. With a bit of magical help they could have children and Kahlan would not have to fear giving birth to a male Confessor.

Zedd smiled at that thought. He definitively was getting ahead of himself and that scenario would never come to pass, and not only because of Richard and his feelings. The people in the Confessor's palace had had a hard time to accept the future ruler of D'Hara as the Mother Confessor's partner, there was no telling how they would react to a Mord-Sith sharing the Mother Confessor's bed.

Richard Rahl, future ruler of D'Hara… Nothing was less certain than that. His grandson still refused to embrace the whole scope of his wizard powers. He did not see himself as a wizard and as long as he did not accept his heritage he would not be able to rule D'Hara and be the magic against magic for his people. And that, Zedd mused, was probably the whole problem. Richard did not want to rule anything. He still saw himself as the woods guide. Richard did not see, he did not yet accept that he had outgrown that role. He did not understand that even if he should go back to his old life in Westland, he no longer would be happy there. Richard had changed, the responsibility of carrying the Sword of Truth had matured him, but he had yet to see that for himself and nothing Zedd could do or say would make this go faster. Richard had to see that in his own time and his own way.

Zedd sighed and stood up slowly. His thoughts were back on familiar territory now, worrying about Richard. He looked down and saw that the grace in which centre he had been sitting no longer was dark grey but a soft white. The Room of Clarity had done its magic. Spelled by a powerful wizard in the early days of the Keep it had served generations of wizards as a place where they could let go of their temper and let their anger, rage and fury out without harming anyone or anything. Bringing to light reason and logic, the Room of Clarity was dedicated to Wizard's Sixth Rule, engraved over the door in an ancient script: "The only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason."

**The End**


End file.
